The Horde Wall

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the Tetris Company had said, on X, that it has nothing to do with the »Build the Wall« game.¹ This was merely the latest entry in a strange sequence of events set in motion on Thursday, when up-and-coming game studio the White House – previously better known as the executive office of the President of the United States – launched an official, vintage-styled arcade.²

»Tetris does not reward you for building a wall. It rewards you for making the wall vanish so that you can keep going«

The flagship title of this set of online games stacks blocks into a border wall and instructs the player to defend it from what the copy calls »the coming horde«.³ The reason Tetris felt compelled to clarify that it hadn’t made the thing, and that it »takes copyright infringement very seriously«, is that the game is built rather closely on Tetris’s own mechanics. The other titles in the arcade borrowed just as freely from Sega and from the creator of Flappy Bird. Neither has said a word, reportedly because the legal case is thin and the political cost of suing the federal government is steep. That sounds like a trademark story. The interesting part is what the White House actually did to Tetris’s premise, not its property.

Tetris is played by arranging four tetrominoes – differently-shaped blocks – that fall down from the top of the screen in an order nobody controls, so that they fit together. That’s the whole game: differences are made to occupy a shared field. When a horizontal line within that field gets filled up, it disappears. Computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov, who built Tetris in 1984 inside a Soviet computing institute, has said the reason is almost administrative: a completed row serves no further purpose, and the player needs the room.⁴ The important thing is this: Tetris does not reward you for building a wall. It rewards you for making the wall vanish so that you can keep going.

Tetris has been fought over before, and the fight was nearly as strange as this one. It escaped the Soviet computing institute where Pajitnov built it and became entangled with ELORG, the state agency that controlled Soviet software exports, then with Nintendo, Atari, the British publisher Mirrorsoft, and Robert Maxwell’s son Kevin, in a scramble for the rights that played out in the last months of the USSR itself.⁵ What was being settled was never really who owned some falling blocks. It was who got to decide what they meant, and who they could be sold to. Forty years later, another state has picked up the game and settled that question for itself, without asking.

»Build the Wall« keeps every other mechanic but reverses the one thing that truly mattered. The wall is no longer the thing you clear. It’s the thing you’re building toward, the actual win condition. Nothing about the code has to change for this to work: players are told that completion is now the goal, and the whole game inverts underneath them without a single new rule.

It’s a cheap trick, but it works because it doesn’t ask the player to agree with anything. The administration didn’t need to argue that a wall is good, or even mention the border by name more than once. It only needed to borrow a procedure nobody examines – fall, rotate, stack, clear – and substitute a political object for the neutral one. You already know how to play. The game just quietly redefines what winning means, while you’re busy congratulating yourself on a well-placed piece of border wall shielding against Mexican immigrants.

A wall is usually described as something that separates two things that were already different. Architectural historian Robin Evans’s point, in his essay on walls, is closer to the opposite: the wall is what makes the two sides different in the first place. It doesn’t divide an inside from an outside so much as manufacture both sides at once: one gets retreat, the other gets exclusion, and both are produced by the identical piece of construction.⁶ Before the Berlin Wall, a street in Berlin was a street. After the wall, the same pavement was suddenly a border, and the people on either side, who had been neighbours the night before, were separated by a fortified line one of them could be shot for crossing. The city didn’t change. The relations inside it did.⁷

Architect Rem Koolhaas looked at this and asked the perverse follow-up question: what if you wanted the wall? His 1972 project Exodus takes the Berlin Wall’s logic and makes it voluntary; a walled enclave inside London whose residents choose the enclosure for what it lets them become on the inside.⁸ This is the same mechanism as sanctions, tariffs, a freeze on immigration, or the general promise to make a country self-sufficient again: reduce what crosses the boundary, and the interior gets to imagine itself as coherent, sufficient, whole. It’s a fantasy every walled compound and every nation-state has entertained, and it survives contact with reality about as well as the Berlin Wall did – imperfectly, and usually at a cost visible only from the other side.

None of which the people who built the arcade were likely thinking about. That doesn’t make it less telling. The White House’s arcade includes a game called »Rio Run«, a Snake clone in which the player »deports« migrants along the Rio Grande – proof that »Build the Wall« is not a one-off, but a coherent aesthetic: dress up cruelty as nostalgia, and it stops registering as cruelty.

Most boundaries are built to keep things apart – that’s the ordinary work of a wall. Tetris was the odd one out: a boundary built to let different things fit together instead. »Build the Wall« doesn’t invent a new kind of boundary. It just puts Tetris back in line with all the others. Tetris still answers the old question without a word of argument: it completes the wall, then lets it disappear, because letting go was the whole point. The US government’s version doesn’t let go of anything. It asks you to keep building, and to brand the people on the other side of it a horde while you do it.

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